* Posts by Dazed and Confused

2385 publicly visible posts • joined 12 Sep 2007

US government seizes Texas gun mass murder to demand backdoors

Dazed and Confused

Re: Oh dear

"No reasonable person questions our right, and obligation, to access the phone," Rosenstein said today.

How about insisting on a back door on guns?

"No reasonable person questions our right, and obligation, to access the gun and stop you shooting at innocent crowds of people"

Does that read better?

Access to nutters phones won't help keep people alive.

Fine, OK, no backdoors, says Deputy AG. Just keep PLAINTEXT copies of everyone's messages

Dazed and Confused

what part of end to end doesn't he understand

> so long as companies can cough up an unencrypted copy of every message, call, photo or other form of communications they handle.

Ere, the whole point of end to end encryption is that it's encrypted at the senders end and it's decrypted at the receiving end. Those pesky companies in the middle don't get a look in. That's the whole point.

NSA bloke used backdoored MS Office key-gen, exposed secret exploits – Kaspersky

Dazed and Confused

Re: Oooooh, really?!?!?

> found the secret NSA code during the scan, and uploaded it to Kaspersky's cloud for further study by staff.

So you're saying that if your anti-virus SW finds any files which might be of interest to your business abd quickly steals a copy before anyone realises their mistake. Is it only source code you steal or perhaps you upload any photos and videos too.

Google India must pay back-taxes on $225m after cheekily funneling cash through Ireland

Dazed and Confused

Witholding tax

When I work in India I have to pay Indian withholding tax. They give me a certificate for this money which I then pass on to the UK taxman so I don't have to pay tax on it twice. Seems fair that Google has to do the same.

Our useless revenue service should do the same. Any profit made by multi-nationals in the UK should be taxed in the UK, they can then have a certificate for that tax which they can then use to avoid double taxation in their chosen tax haven.

Windows 10 Fall Creators Update tackles IT's true menace: Cheating gamers

Dazed and Confused

Re: W10 fall edition tackles IT's true menace: UPTIME

> Well I would do, but they seem to have gone away. ...

Seems at least 2 people don't believe me.

Where would you like me to post the screen shots to show you that I don't have the options to tell this stupid thing that it's a metered connection.

I know I'm supposed to be able to go to start->settings->network & Internet->Ethernet and the setting is supposed to be down here.

Well it isn't.

Dazed and Confused

Re: W10 fall edition tackles IT's true menace: UPTIME

Well this evening it rebooted again and no sooner had it come up but it flashed up that damn message in the bottom right hand corner saying it needed to reboot again to finish loading updates. OK this time I manually rebooted. Total uptime this time around? probably less than 1 minute.

Now I'm really happy for those people who aren't getting constant reboots. Maybe MS haven't got around to you yet. Maybe you're doing something different to me. I just want this pile of **** to work when I need it and at the moment it doesn't.

Dazed and Confused

Re: W10 fall edition tackles IT's true menace: UPTIME

Well I would do, but they seem to have gone away. I've tried following the instructions to get to them and the buttons just don't exist. Hence the mega-pissed offness.

Dazed and Confused

W10 fall edition tackles IT's true menace: UPTIME

The new updates seem to cause my PCs to reboot so damn often it's difficult to get any work done. Bill Gates famously boasted at the W2K launch that some of their systems had been up for 80 days. Well there is bugger all chance of that now a'days.

What I want to know is whether MS will agree to pay all my excuse usage charges for downloading tons of stuff at expensive times of day rather than letting me schedule the downloads to a time when I'm not too busy working and can move the damn things to a different network connection.

Amadeus booking software outages smack airports across world

Dazed and Confused

Re: 'we experienced a network issue '

#6 We're going to blame "the network", because it sounds plausible.

Or more likely because it sounds like it might be someone else's fault so just maybe we'll get away with it.

Remember it's not important what went wrong, the important thing is how you lay the blame.

Driverless cars will make more traffic, say transport boffins

Dazed and Confused

Re: Maybe...

It's not the idea of someone chundering in the back of our car that worries me so much, I mean almost everyone accepts that you shouldn't do technicolour yawns in the car. It's the way that a lot of people treat their own cars. I'm sure we all know people who you'd rather walk than go into their cars, or if you really must enter them, you want a hazmat suit or in milder cases you just want to have everything you're wearing washed (if not incinerated) the moment you get out. It's not just the parents of young kids who think it OK for their little Jenny to grind half chewed rusks into the seats or the road warriors who live in their cars and have 6 months worth of takeaway boxes, crisp packets and chocolate wrappers piled up all over the place.

Taxis are for sharing. If I buy a car it is because I want it to be my own personal space.

Linux 4.14 'getting very core new functionality' says Linus Torvalds

Dazed and Confused

Re: Windows vs Linux ... really?

> Sadly for many until things like systemd are erased completely

Systemd might be OK for "Linux on the desktop" but it doesn't seem to have any useful features for Linux on my servers.

But it's not really the topic of conversation.

Apple: Our stores are your 'town square' and a $1,000 iPhone is your 'future'

Dazed and Confused

Re: @ Voland's right hand

> I agree with that comment on the bezeless phones actually real nice look, but it's going in a case as soon as I get one anyway, thing lives in my pocket all day.

I've got a S7Edge thing and keep it in my pocket but I don't want to add a case as that would bulk it up to much. Mind it is the first mobile I'm managed to break the screen on, dropping 3' face down onto a tiled floor probably wasn't a great move.

The photos I've seen of this new iPhone don't look like the screen really is edge to edge, there's loads of space around the edge, at least a mm or 2. To me, edge to edge means that if a mate an I put our phones down side by side there should be no discernable gap and that it won't be long until an app arrives that lets us treat the pair of phones as a single bigger screen, or put several down together to get a much bigger one to watch movies on.

VMware pushes NSX deeper into containers, security

Dazed and Confused
Joke

What's this, VMWare having to push their NSX? I thought Honda's were more reliable than that. Maybe theirs is like Alonso's one.

Hi Amazon, Google, Apple we might tax you on revenue rather than profit – love, Europe

Dazed and Confused

Re: Witholding tax

> They WANT to cheat, can AFFORD to do so

That's the whole idea, the tax certificate you could obtain from them would be low, so you'd only be able to write off a low amount in a higher tax location.

Only if you could provide evidence that you'd somehow run up huge expenses in a "cheating" country would you be able to avoid the tax in the higher one.

I guess it would depend on just how a company would be expected to prove it's costs.

Dazed and Confused

Witholding tax

When I do business in, say, India. I have to pay Indian tax on my fees, I then get a certificate from the Indian tax man to effect that I've paid this much tax which I can then in effect pass on to the UK taxman so I don't get taxed twice. But it does mean that I pay tax at the higher of the 2 rates rather than the lower of the 2.

It surely can't be beyond the whit of the taxation departments of the national governments to come up with a scheme like this which applies more generally to businesses. This way if an international company has sales of say 1Billion in Hightax Land and then says, well yes we sold a Billion, but that's not profit because we have to pay 99.99% of that to our head office in Lowtax Land, then they'd be able to take their tax certificate from Lowtax land, which says we've paid 3p and they'd be able to deduct the 3p from the normal 20ish% of 1Billion. OK, I know that's ridiculously simplistic, you'd need to be able to chase the costs right the way through, but the assumption would that you can deduct cost but only if you could prove where they come from and prove that someone paid some tax on them somewhere. And that within your group you'd pay tax at the higher of the rates between where you sold it and where you normally do you accounting.

We don't need another hero: Huawei overtakes Apple – even without a big-hitter

Dazed and Confused

Re: Apple is doomed

Doomed maybe, but they probably still make more money from selling their phones than any of the rest. Apple's customer base are happy to pay what ever premium is demanded. Also come Christmas Apple will probably have a really good month as lots of shiny things are bought as presents.

I can't remember whether it was Hewlett or Packard who famously said that any fool can buy market share, it's the profit that counts.

I've no intention of ever buying an iPhone, but you've got to admire their ability to gouge large piles of cash out of their enraptured customers.

It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower

Dazed and Confused

Re: Smartphones of the time could not drive an Aero like 3D interface

The 3D interface comes from HP Windows from the early 80s, they were doing this on machines with a 68000 CPU. It was then incorporated in Windows 3 which was supposed to run on i386 boxes. The 3D stuff wasn't the problem as I recall, the problem for the 386 boxes was the font rendering speeds. Surely the WindowsPhone CPUs could scrape up the performance of a 386?

Dazed and Confused

Re: Bring back...

Windows 1.0.

Oh wait... they did.

In "clean" designs the "." is invisible

Dazed and Confused

Re: Personally

but I do know I hate flat interfaces.

I've often given up on websites when I can't easily spot the scroll bar to go down to the buy option, or because I can't even find the button I need.

It isn't just the billions lost in terms of wasted time, it's the billions of lost due to customers sodding off to someone else's website which is easier to use.

UK.gov unveils six areas to pilot full-fat fibre, and London ain't on the list

Dazed and Confused

Re: Scrap HS2

> HS2 has been totally mis-sold. It's absolutely necessary, but not for the reasons generally articulated.

I know that this isn't really about the HS bit, it's about adding capacity, but I'd still argue that adding digital capacity to the country would be a better investment and help more people more of the time. We can't spend the money twice so I'd just suggesting we invest in 21st century capacity rather than 19th century capacity. In an ideal world we'd do both, but HS2 would be tunnelled for most of it's length, We don't however live in an ideal world so choices need to be made.

Dazed and Confused

Scrap HS2

and go for full fibre for everyone.

Terry Pratchett's unfinished works flattened by steamroller

Dazed and Confused

Re: Crivens

When it comes to the Wee Free Men, thankfully no one is a native speaker.

Huge Apple news confirmed. Software deal with Accenture is official

Dazed and Confused

So what are they going to do together...

Develop a shredder for iPads?

Mazda and Toyota join forces on Linux-based connected car platform

Dazed and Confused

Re: Base models

I'm pretty sure Caterham will still sell you a car without any of those things. They also have the benefit of not having rear seats for the little darlings to pester you from.

Dazed and Confused

With an option to feed some knock-out gas in to the rear compartment the first time the little buggers ask "are we nearly there yet"

KVM plans big boosts to storage and nested virtualization

Dazed and Confused

NPIV

They're going to support NPIV properly at last, wonderful. I hope they do it like they did on HP-UX donkeys years ago so that you any up with a virtual HBA inside the VM. It makes so many things easier with managing storage with VMs.

Oh happy day

Forget trigonometry, 'cos Babylonians did it better 3,700 years ago – by counting in base 60!

Dazed and Confused

Re: So much for digital

> Whilst I work (measure and cut) in mm

Is this for lengths or cross sections?

I was amused to note when ordering a replacement thermostat for my posh German shower that the fittings are 3/4" ones.

Paris nightclub red-faced after booze-for-boobs offer exposed

Dazed and Confused

Re: Not unusual

When I worked as a barman several women offered to flash their boobs (or more) for a free drink. Some of them weren't even pissed first.

Dazed and Confused

Re: Surely men should be offered a free shot

Some how I can't imagine Granny Weatherwax in fishnets.

Red Hat banishes Btrfs from RHEL

Dazed and Confused

Re: maintained as a JBOD DAS file system

> One disadvantage is expensive RAID controllers or enclosures may be useless, and the CPU/RAM requirements are high.

CPUs and CPU licenses are far more expensive than a HW RAID controller and not only that they are slower too when it comes to things like the checksum calculations. These jobs are better off offloaded to a dedicated piece of HW IMHO.

Dazed and Confused

Re: Anyone else just use ext4?

Yepp, it's the default on RHEL/CentOS 6 and that doesn't have systemd so yes I still use a lot of ext4.

Systemd wins top gong for 'lamest vendor' in Pwnie security awards

Dazed and Confused

I never realised

systemd was a winner

Sensor-rich traffic info shows how far Silly Valley has to drive

Dazed and Confused

Cartel

Given what else the German cartel have recently been found doing, anyone trying to get into this business might do well to high some lawyers and go a'hunting. Looks like Germany's car industry is about to fund the whole of the EU for years to come just from the fines they'll be hit with. Yeah right... fetch the pop-corn and watch what happens.

Three: No fixed date yet for 4G services abroad

Dazed and Confused

Re: *yawn*

On holiday in France a couple of years ago I got perfectly good data on 3 my deal, even managed to do conferencing and sort out a IT snafu for a customer from the top of one of the Alps, try that in the Lake District (which is where I'll be next week). Until recently Portugal was a pain since it wasn't on the free list. But I was still able to tunnel web access from my PC back through my proxy at home OK.

Find your happy place: Fedora 26 has landed

Dazed and Confused

Re: Happy place (off topic)

I too prefer CentOS, as long as I'm allowed to stay with 6.X then I much prefer the anaconda installer, it does a good job working with servers with mixed disk technologies and setting up multipathing automatically. The RHEL7 anaconda installer isn't as good, The SLES 11 installer is pretty but has a habit of installing the OS on one disk and grub on another and is a pain to control just where grub will end up and the drive order definition, SLES12's installer has abandoned leaving you a nice autoyast.xml file and also stopped using the same UI for the installer and as the autoyast editor which I always thought was the best bit of SUSE. The Debian installer can be a total PITA on servers with different disks attached, I usually end up out at the shell to work out what's going on, thank the lords of the kernel for /sys. Preseeding would be much improved if there was any documentation worth the name, the installer saved a preseeding file for what you've just done and if they'd damn well read the preseeding file at the start of the install so you didn't have to pass options in through the commandline. ARGH!

Dazed and Confused

Happy place

Oh bugger, when you said it would be a happy place I thought at last systemd was being abandoned.

Q. What's today's top language? A. Python... no, wait, Java... no, C

Dazed and Confused

Re: I suspect there are quite a few Java devs out there

> In my experience many of them might be using Java, but they write C programs.

As the saying goes "A good Fortran programmer can write Fortran in any language"

Openreach asks UK what it thinks about 10 million 'full fibre' connections

Dazed and Confused

Re: contention ratios

Thanks Mad,

What I had been musing on was what the total bandwidth of a 3G or 4G cell is, Speed testing my backup mobile hotspot I get about 35Mb/s, but when I do that it doesn't impact my kids streaming full HD video on their phones, neither does their activity impact my speed test, so I can see that the local 4G cell has a total bandwidth available of more than 35Mb/s, in fact I can test from both my phone and my hotspot at the same time, without them impacting each other.

I just wasn't sure what the total bandwidth available is.

> The only answer is to open up more bandwidth to enable more channels etc.

I'm pretty sure that there just isn't enough spectrum to cope with all conceivable comms traffic unless we start using gamma rays and the like :-).

As you say fibre gives you you're only private channel so that you don't need to compete with anyone else over that part of the link. Upstream then you'll be sharing bandwidth with others coming through the same bits of kit. Ultimately if you all want to hit the same website, then they might have a finite amount of bandwidth. There are always limits somewhere.

Dazed and Confused

contention ratios

Agreed. Was stood on top of Lanrigg Fell on sunday with full 3G good enough for video calls.

Sure, when you are the only person doing it.

Most of the time my 4G phone connection is faster than my FTTC line. In fact my kids don't bother with WiFi on their phones at all, they just use 4G.

However. When BT/OpenRetch screw up the link and everyone in my area jumps onto their mobiles then the performance sucks big time. I don't know what the full bandwidth potential of a 3G or 4G cell is, but it isn't enough when a lot of people want to use it at the same time.

Linus Torvalds may have damned systemd with faint praise

Dazed and Confused

Re: Where is the faster bootup time?

> I have thousands of servers running CentOS6 and CentOS7. The boot times are identical.

systemd is supposed to give faster boot times by allowing some start up operations to be performed in parallel. That's the theory.

But then they go an make RHEL7 do more at startup so they can loose the advantages that systemd was trying to achieve.

A great example of this is when you boot a server with several LAN cards in for installation. The new startup wants to DHCP each NIC but doesn't do it in parallel and has a hard codes 1 minute timeout. So if you got a server with a shed load of NICs which aren't on a network which offers DHCP then the boot takes bloody ages. Of course there is an option to say you only want to use a particular NIC and control how it will be configured, but it isn't always easy to determine what it will be called.

Anyway the theory is that systemd allows things like services to be started in parallel, but the practice and the theory are two very different things.

Dazed and Confused

Re: replacing init with something "sane"

systemd was a good idea.

Well, part of it.

Replace the init system with something sane, that allows all kinds of extra features, automated startup dependencies, etc. Hell, even replacing scripts with a real program isn't actually that insane in the modern world.

I would argue that it wasn't "init" that needed replacing, it was "rc".

init is supposed to be the initial launcher (a minor task IMHO, it's eons since we all used serial lines and needed respawning for our getty's) and then it is is the catcher for orphans. The kernel needs somewhere to put them and so the kernel is very attached to PID 1, this is init's job. Since the kernel needs PID 1 to be there it will panic if PID 1 dies.

This is where systemd is going wrong. It is placing something far to complicated inside this orphan catcher.

The other problem with systemd is that they've not define limits on what it is trying to achieve. So it grows off in all sorts of directions. Why does the launcher also want to be the logging system?

I would also argue that launching services at startup from scripts is a better way than launching from inside a "compiled" program. It encourages the developers to make sure everything can be done easily from the command line. It also makes it trivial for admins to see what is supposed to have happened, 30 years ago no one would have dreamt of trying to administer a Unix machine without being a C programmer, for the last 20+ years that's not been the case. But even if the admins can understand the C or other compiled language they can't just walk through the steps by hand.

As someone put in a message a short while back "Don't do anything in C that you could have done in a script".

Personally I'm really not convinced that for most users the boot up speed is a killer. I usually use Linux as a server OS, Red Hat 7 has systemd in "Enterprise" Linux which is mostly used as a server OS and here boot speed isn't a big issue, especially when the POST might take 20+minutes by the time you've got a sensible amount of RAM on board.

So regardless of what is driving the "rc" mechanism I want to see the services started from scripts please.

Microsoft drops Office 365 for biz. Now it's just Microsoft 365. Word

Dazed and Confused

Re: but pretty close. Definitely will work

But then that's true of Office too. Just because it formatted your document yesterday doesn't mean it will format it today. Hell it might even go back to formatting your document correctly tomorrow, who knows. But when it comes to Office the phase "Definitely will work" does not apply, the best you can hope for is "probably will work" or even "usually works*"

OK, so i'm pissed off at the moment, last week PP in O365 decided to replace all the "_" characters in my presentations with funny square boxes and changing the widths of lots of text so things didn't fit where they should have. Then after a reboot it went back to displaying things correctly.

(*) for a given value of works.

It's time for a long, hard mass debate over sex robots, experts conclude

Dazed and Confused

Re: * RIP Iain M Banks

But the late great Iain M Banks wasn't the first.

If you think about SciFi involving robots then you can't help but think of Isaac Asimov, and he introduced the concept in one of his robot series books.

PCs will get pricier and you're gonna like it, say Gartner market shamans

Dazed and Confused

Re: computing like it's 1989?

Surely in 1989 wpuld have been on 1280x1024 monitors. I know that's what I was using. Lovely sharp Sony reference monitors with no choice of screen res since that just lead to blurring.

Brit prosecutors ask IT suppliers to fight over £3 USB cable tender

Dazed and Confused
Facepalm

£3

For a USB cable

Oh Lordy someone saw you coming.

Male escort says he gave up IT to do something more meaningful

Dazed and Confused

Re: "I get to make a genuine difference to people's lives"

On a serious note, that's why a lot of people give up when they're working in I.T.

Yepp that's why my Mrs gave up IT, albeit it not to go into escorting... at least not as far as I've noticed.

Don't panic, but Linux's Systemd can be pwned via an evil DNS query

Dazed and Confused

Re: If THIS isn't a reason to hate systemd...

I typed ifconfig to confirm one of it's ip addresses. OOPS some self righteous @$$hat decided that systemd is so awesome that we should all type "ip addr show" now, because you know reasons.

I don't think the move to using the "ip" command in place of "ifconfig" is anything to do with systemd. The ip command gives more control over the network config than ifconfig, but ifconfig is easier to use in most simple cases. RHEL7 has taken the the dumb (IMHO) decision not to include ifconfig (and all the other Berkeley network commands) in the default "minimal" configuration. For the most part ip and ifconfig happily co-exist.

Surely if systemd had it's way it would be illegal to configure any network device without using NetworkManager. NM together with systemd is an even more challenging environment. There is a reason why most OpenStack howto docs start off with instructions on disabling NM. You don't have to go as far as OpenStack to discover why, any system which doesn't just manually deploy VMs is likely to have major issues.

On the other hand NM can be useful on laptops.

Dazed and Confused

Re: If THIS isn't a reason to hate systemd...

ALL software has bugs, get over it.

It is precisely because all software has bugs that design decisions should be made to limit the impact of those bugs. It's like RAID, all disks are unreliable, eventually the industry twigged that the answer wasn't to make more reliable disks (even though that helped a bit) the answer was to design storage systems where disks dying wasn't a big problem.

When it comes to SW the trick is to make sure that you're not exposed to the risk of bugs unnecessarily. Design your SW so as to limit the impact of the inevitable bugs.

Dazed and Confused

Re: 2017 and inaccurately implemented protocols causing buffer overflows are still a thing.

Never unconditionally trust input from outside your code

I'm not sure I'd trust input from inside the code either

a) We all make mistakes

b) At some point someone else is probably going to fiddle with your code who won't understand the limitations.

Dazed and Confused

Re: If THIS isn't a reason to hate systemd...

Getting rid of systemd won't stop buffer overruns.

No it won't be getting rid of buffer overruns, but something as critical to system operation as systemd simply should never be placed in a position where it can be exposed to this kind of attack, or any kind of remote attack. That's not an "I hate systemd" statement, that's a basic security for kindergarten level lesson.

Fixing these issues is going to be a giant game of wack'o'mole where there is simply no need to expose yourself to danger in the first place. This isn't just a bug it's a fundamental design flaw.